Hello, McFly

For me when I think about what the future was suppose to be two sets of images come to mind. Star Trek and Back to the Future. There are many iconic images from those shows, Star Trek in particular, that have become reality. The technology that let Captain Kirk chat with far-out hippie aliens on a large screen at the front of the bridge is arriving soon with LG and Panasonic partnering up with Skype. The flip cell phone was patterned after the communicator and the blue tooth headsets today sure remind me of that strange knob looking thing that Lt Uhura wore in her ear.

Fast forward 20 years and Robert Zemeckis brought us hover boards, tennis shoes that tied themselves and one size fits all self adjusting clothing. Oh, and of course flying cars that traveled through time. I'm still waiting on the Zemechis plan, but I'm hopeful. Self tying shoes are a large man's dream fashion statement!

I was trading emails with my brother Mike recently. 15 or so years separate us. It's just long enough for him to represent the prior generation to me (not an "old guy" joke bro, so no pinning me down and tickling me). Most of my earlier memories of Mike were of him as a long haul truck driver. Having logged over a million miles on the roads he has a rare perspective on commuting. He tells driving stories that will make you grind your teeth flat. So when he says "I truly hate the commuting process in this state" it carries Morgan Freeman like gravitas.

"Before me is a telegraphic key that is of special significance. It has been used by seven Presidents to open great expositions such as the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition in Seattle in 1909, the Panama Canal, and many others. It was presented to me by your senior Senator Warren Magnuson at the White House last Wednesday. By closing this key may we open not only a great World's fair, may we open an era of peace and understanding among all mankind. Let the fair begin!" -- John F. Kennedy's opening remarks for the Seattle World's Fair, April 21^st, 1962.

In expressing his own frustration with this area's commute, Mike talked about the excitement that the Seattle area had as JFK spoke those words. The Monorail provided an expectant glimpse to the future of commuting and plans to extend its 1+ mile long route promised to launch the Puget Sound into the 21^st century. In reality I guess it did give us a look to our future, just not quite the ambitious, hopeful version expressed by the President. The Monorail never saw that expansion and it wasn't until recent years that we've seen any movement toward a serious mass transit plan for the area. As Mike said, after the fair it was like "all the smart people left town."

Here we are, 50 years later and we have The Link Light Rail in place that runs from Seatac to downtown (the same route as the original expansion planned for the Monorail). Does this signal a new hope for the area? Have the smart people returned to finally deliver on that promise? Well, I've ridden it and I'm not convinced. Don't get me wrong, the train is a marvel of engineering matched in scale perhaps only by its cost. My only real complaint about the experience is that the seats are really uncomfortable. For a big guy I don't have as much padding on the caboose as one would assume. After 20 minutes of "riding the rail" I was pining for the comfort of an aluminum bench seat at a little league baseball game and starting to think I had actually been "riding a rail".

Setting my admittedly somewhat unique comfort requirements aside, here's my real question. Is the plan to overhaul our transit system ambitious enough? The first iteration of the Light Rail takes passengers from downtown to the airport. I guess I get that this is a selling point for Seattle and they really pushed to get it done in time for the Vancouver Winter Olympics. As a traveler visiting the area, it does look good on tourist flyers that we have Light Rail service to downtown. But which problem are we trying to solve here?

Call me silly but somehow I would have liked to see that $1.7 billion put into a route that actually had an immediate impact on the commute for people that live here. Sure, at some point in the plan it makes sense to extend this service to Seatac, but was that the highest priority?

It will be some time before we know the truth to any of this and probably well beyond the point that I will be able to take advantage of it. I'm guessing though that if I haven't run down the curtain and joined the choir invisible by then I'll be sitting in my rocking chair on the front porch and saying "Meh, Light Rail, Monorail, same blasted pie in the sky silliness. Hey! You pain in my no-padding butt little miscreants, stay off my lawn!!!"

Don't drive angry! Drive weird!

Mach 9 with your hair on fire

Wow, it was cold the last couple of days! Western Washington weather is crazy and the way residents respond to it is even crazier!

We use a DVR for all our TV watching. We like being able to skip the commercials and frankly without being able to I'm not sure how much TV I'd be willing to sit through. That's another blog though.

There are a couple odd things about watching everything on a DVR. For one, I no longer know what time or network a given show is on. I find it in the list and mash play. Because it's all recorded everything we watch is delayed by hours at least and sometimes days. Last night, in our copious hours of free time, Tammy and I watched one of our favorite programs. It aired originally on Monday and we watched it 24 hours later. In the middle of one scene, a marquee begins to scroll across the bottom of the screen with breaking news.

Every time that happens it conjures up terrible images for me. It's probably the result of growing up during the paranoia laden Cold War era where America sat grinding their teeth waiting for news that the missile exchange was occurring and we should "assume the position". Maybe it's the memory of 9-11 and the days after too. It seems like we spent weeks dividing our attention between the talking heads and that stream of text scrolling underneath. Between the stress, trying to keep one eye on the announcer, and one eye on the text, I think I developed muscle cramps of a type never before experienced by a human being. I'm surprised we haven't seen ads on late night TV from sleazy law offices offering to sue the networks on our behalf. "Did you or someone you know develop Yappidypanic syndrome during the coverage of the terror attacks of 9-11? If so, contact the law offices of Ray Soosalot. You may be entitled to compensation."

Ok, back to our regularly scheduled programming. Scrolling across the screen was this message "Breaking news: Rain mixed with snow is moving into Western Washington and the Puget Sound area…" Umm, huh? Rain mixed with snow? Wow, send up the flares and break out the emergency rations. I nearly fell off the couch.

Drivers in this area really do go nuts in any weather that deviates from 58 and overcast. Add to that the way our news media turns every drop of rain into "Storm Watch: 2010" it's a wonder we get anywhere. I was thinking about this today as I rode through downtown in one of the big articulated buses. All this was going through my head as I watched this driver maneuver this giant machine through downtown Seattle at an amazing clip. I've been riding the bus long enough now to say that these folks have amazing skills. Seattle, like most cities, is a driving nightmare. Calling what the folks behind the wheel of these buses do "driving" are like saying Meadowlark Lemon could bounce a ball, Jimmy Wayne is out for a walk, or Jimi Hendrix played the guitar. I can drive our little Hyundai around those streets, but what those people do is a completely different thing.

I did have one experience though that brought me close to calling Tammy and telling her not to bother picking me up at the Renton Transit Center. The good news would have been that she could star home early that day and that the end result was likely to be considered accidental so the extra insurance would kick in. I got onto the bus out bound from Redmond and the driver didn't look familiar. Now, I haven't been doing the bus thing that long, so I didn't think too much of the "new face". As we headed out though, the first thing that grabbed my attention was the age and condition of the bus. Rickety is probably too kind a word. As we rounded our first corner, the driver cut it a little short and we rolled over the curb. Again, hey, these things are bound to happen, but I wasn't worried… yet. Next I noticed the bus seem to change speed a lot, and switch lanes somewhat radically. That's when I started to worry.

My brain is prone to spin on things and I began to do the math at this point. Rickety, older bus, erratic driving, and the driver seemed just a little lost. Either the bus has been stolen by a "wannabe" transit operator or we had a new driver. The likelihood of the former being quite low, I assumed the latter. I decided to take my head phones off and listen. Sure enough, our pilot was fairly new to the route and the profession. The other thing that became apparent was she was darned excited to be employed and was really enjoying the work. She couldn't have seemed more elated had she screamed "Waaaaahooo" and made calf roping motions above her head. It was both wonderful to see someone so happy to be working and colon cleansingly terrifying to be bouncing down the road with her at the helm.

I've been on her bus several times now and she's gotten much better. She's rapidly building her skill and my head phones are back in my ears. You know what though, the excitement she has for her new job doesn't appear to have decreased one bit. They need to issue her a cowboy hat!

I don't worry so much when I see her pull up now. In fact, I rather enjoy the energy that fills the bus. If I look out and see rain and snow mixed as she pulls up though I may have to make that phone call to tell Tammy the combo to the safe.

Don't drive angry! Drive weird!

Hand me down knowledge

Tammy and I had a nice relaxing weekend. Last week was wildly busy and this week portends to be the same so we took this weekend and hibernated.

Several of my friends are getting (or have gotten) their first drivers license recently. Yes, these are 16 year old-ish "peeps", and yes I call them friends because that's what they are. I've gotten to know them over the last year or two through church. Granted there's a generation gap that keeps me from knowing when I'm suppose to put "izzle" on the ends of words and they aren't likely to want to spend a bunch of time talking about that awesome Merlot I found for $7.99. They will occasionally risk their reputations by giving me a lame old guy fist bump for which I'm quite honored. We don't blow it up after though, I don't want to get them completely ostracized by their peers.

Getting your license is huge. I still remember that sense of freedom that came with getting behind the wheel of the car that first time. Talking, well ok mostly teasing, my friends about getting their license made me think about teaching my daughter Alia to drive. I'm not what you'd call the most patient person. Anyone who has worked with me to accomplish any task from cleaning house to implementing a recursive API knows that sitting back and pondering the esthetic nuances of how I approach the task isn't something I do. I think if you asked her Alia would answer that I was a different person sitting next to her in the car. I've always been hard on her, but I may have earned a fist bump for the driving lessons.

All this got me thinking about what influence my parents had on me learning to drive. My mom taught me all kinds of things. She taught me to cook and how to persevere. She wasn't about to try and teach me to drive though. My father wasn't around when I got my license but he did at one point give me some driving tips. I guess I was probably 8 years old when he explained how useful the new bumps on the edge of the road were. They had just lined several streets in his area with bumps on the edge of the roadway designed to give an audible warning as you crossed onto the shoulder. My dad told me "When you've had too much to drink, you can put your tires on those bumps and it helps you to stay on the road. If you don't hear the thrum thrum, you stop the car." Ahh, wisdom that drains down like the stream in sports stadium trough urinal.

Dad was a two case a beer a day drunk. I can tell a mess of stories of being in the 63 Comet he had, no seatbelt, bouncing around as he drained the Heidelberg and Rainier. When we'd take long trips, like the infamous Independence Day trip to Caldwell Idaho, he'd take advantage of the wonderful park like settings of the Rest Areas to lay out a blanket and sleep it off. Yup, we were living the dream. Things got worse to the point that my parents divorced and I didn't see my Dad much until I was in my 20's. He got sober, remarried, and started a new family. He didn't seem to remember much of those times. At one point he bought his dream car, some sort of Ford Mustang, and had rolled it over on SR99. The car was destroyed and he woke up. He was sober the last 9 years of his life.

All too frequently as we drive down Key Peninsula Highway we get behind a drunk driver. It baffles me that at this point with all the statistics and education that I still see these folks, in the oncoming lane of travel on moment, and nearly in the ditch the next. Our police have a whole infrastructure underfunded just to manage drunk drivers. I understand addiction, I do. I get the desire to escape. I've had times in my life that I've crawled into my own forms of self delusion to pretend that pain wasn't there. That behavior that causes people to run in panic from life nullified my relationship with my father and played a significant part in the loss of my brother Lyle.

But what clicks in the inebriated brain that says, "Wow, I'm on my lips! Let's go for drive"? I know you think you can explain it to me. Lots of folks have tried. I'll still look at you and scratch my head. But here's an even more important question, what do we have to do to stop them? When I worked for the Patrol we would frequently hear stories from Troopers about drunks they had bagged who had been convicted 5 or 6 times! Maybe it's gotten better, but my guess is that it hasn't. Perhaps one of my friends that still work there will read this and chime in.

I went to Bing and searched on Washington State drunk driving laws, and out of the first page of results all but one were some kind of advertisement for attorneys who specialize in DUI defense so I'm betting the practice is alive and well.

I bet you are thinking I'm about to make an appeal for my own solution to this problem. Well, I'm not. Here's what I am going to say. It should be no surprise to anyone that our roads are filled nightly with some percentage of pickled drivers. It probably isn't a shocker when I say that we see a fair number of them on KPH. I will make this plea though. KPH is a dark 2 lane road with no shoulder in most places. Why is it that I see people walking down this thing wearing black jeans, black t-shirts and black jackets? Even worse, why are many of these pedestrians kids?

In truth I don't see a sustainable answer to these problems on the horizon. I think there are answers to be had; I just don't think we seem to be able muster up the collective will to solve them. Drunk driving was one of the earliest "hot button" topics I can remember. The moment a problem reaches that profile level all hope of solving them seems to dissipate. Too many people see opportunity in misery. They begin to use it as a platform to get elected to public office, write books, and start support groups. Can you imagine a lawyer who makes his money defending drivers charged with DUI becoming an advocate of a long term solution to drinking and driving?

The same story gets told over and over again. Terrorism, health care, pollution, you name it.

Perhaps I just lack vision. Where some people look at suffering and pain and see "book deal" I just see suffering and pain. I guess I need to learn to look on the bright side.

Don't drive angry! Drive weird!